Observations on economics, the academy, the wider world, and things that run on rails.

5.10.17

FINIS, CREDENTIALED ESTABLISHMENT?

The warning signs were there, if you knew where to look. (It's happened a lot faster than I anticipated, viz this from 2013: "Changing the expectation for presidents, nay for Washington politicians generally is a task several orders of magnitude tougher. It might take even more serious government failure to change minds.")

So, as a practical matter, we only lose our rights if we allow ourselves to be shamed, threatened, whined, and lectured into giving them up by skeevy tragedy-buzzard pols, mainstream media meat puppets, and late night chucklemonkeys whose names and faces all blend together into one unfunny, preachy blur.

Since at least Woodrow Wilson, progressives have grumbled about the Founders’ achievement, often complaining that the Constitution does not facilitate vigorous government. Power is too divided in this system, Wilson sniffed, leaving the government incapable of acting in behalf of a popular majority. Of course, it is so easy to complain about a majority’s inaction precisely because the Constitution has done such a good job of preventing tyranny of the majority.

Moreover, the Constitution assumes a process of civic deliberation that still rubs people the wrong way. It establishes Congress as the fount of all legislative authority, and by extension it empowers the people who elect the legislature. But over the years, Congress’s power has been shoveled off to unelected bureaucrats and judges. A few years ago, Peter Orszag, former director of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, argued in the New Republic, in a piece titled “Too Much of a Good Thing,” that what we really need is less of that good thing — less democracy. Power should be transferred more fully to experts who can make decisions that the people themselves cannot make.

This view, quite popular in today’s Washington, D.C., is a reimagining of the old notion of mixed estates, whereby certain groups of people (in this case, the credentialed experts) effectively enjoy a permanent place in government regardless of their numbers in society. The Founders rejected this view, in favor of a robust civic republicanism whereby the people do the hard work of governing themselves.

People aren’t against globalization as [former British prime minister Tony] Blair defines it. They’re against trade deals that hurt them economically in order to benefit powerful interests. The “globalization” the left opposes is something altogether different: the domination of multilateral decision-making by powerful financial interests. That’s worth opposing.

Funny, that sounds a lot like Trumpian populism, if perhaps seasoned with a sincerity that a billionaire rent-seeker knows better than to attempt.

The turfing-out, however? More likely to come.

The consensus rule of political insiders across the globe, from center-left to center-right, has not responded to voters’ needs or wishes. As a result, it is falling. That’s not tragedy; it’s democracy. Europe’s center-left became complacent and complicit: complacent in its power, and complicit in its relationship to corporate power.

Professor [Sheri] Berman worries that, without, “populism will flourish and democracy will decay.” But the left’s populism is answering the unmet needs of people in Western Europe and the United States. That’s not decay; it’s progress.